Tularemia’s Deadly Return in US: CDC Warns of Growing Infection Risk

United States: The incidence of the infection, which is also known as ‘rabbit fever‘ or tularemia, has risen in the United States in a decade, with the CDC releasing a report.

More about the news

The disease can occur in humans in a variety of ways, namely through bites done by infected ticks and deer flies, the occurrence of skin contact with infected rabbits, hares, and rodents implicated in the transmission of the bacterium Francisella tularensis, which is very responsive to the disease.

Furthermore, as experts state, there are other complex routes of transmission, such as lawn moving over the nests of animals infected with the disease, which has been said to blow the bacteria in the air, thereby infecting the gardener who might never know what hit him.

Details of the disease

This phenomenon was first noted in a vineyard in Massachusetts in 2000, and the resulting tularemia outbreak was prolonged for half a year and consisted of fifteen identified cases and one individual who died from the disease, sciencealert.com reported.

One of at least another half-dozen Colorado cases reported in 2014 and 2015 was also the result of lawn mowing.

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CDC constantly monitors this bacterium, mainly because, according to the US administration, it falls under the Tier 1 Select Agents list, which concerns bioterrorism agents, as well as because even if the transmission occurs naturally, it can be fatal if left untreated.

What more are the experts stating?

The author of the report added, “The case fatality rate of tularemia is typically less than 2 percent but can be higher depending on clinical manifestation and infecting strain,” sciencealert.com reported.

Of these, across 47 states, tularemia is relatively uncommon, with 2,462 cases reported for the period of ten years 2011- 2022.

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However, the CDC approximated that 1.35 million people across the country get food poisoned by the Salmonella bacterium annually.

In 2017, the CDC expanded the ‘probable cause’ category to include cases where F. tularensis was identified through polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which had classified as probable only a person with symptoms of the disease, along with several biomarkers suggesting the presence of the bacteria.